Sometimes, I’m thinking again of Australia. I cannot do anything about it, it is part of my life. I have to talk about it when I’m introducing myself, when people are asking where I am coming from.
I was mentioning it to the instrument maker and musician Zamba last times (link). He was curious about the country. I did not think at any times about aborigines’ treatment and genocide.
My father asked me recently if I would take my chance again in Australia. I replied a quick no. My answer was very quick as the wound is still fresh and immigration policies still blinkered. Even if I ‘swallowed’ the news and its consequences almost well and quickly on the spot, I’m full of bitterness about this experience. It is a mourning, the mourning of my life in Australia.
I had to leave and refuse so many opportunities. And what is really breaking my heart is that I had to say goodbye/farewell to family and friends. I don’t know how I survived it.
Thoughts on Antananarivo and others
I read in different documents and articles that Antananarivo was teared about its status. It is wavering between urban and countryside. As rural migration is intense towards the capital city, motivated by the hope of getting a job, it is an explanation of this hesitation.
So some practices and habits are not adapted to this new environment. But how can we blame these people with life-time habits for some and especially if they don’t know how to do differently?
More generally, about all humans, from the Indian Ocean and elsewhere, how to break a habit? How come some people accept to change their habits?
About hygiene (I’m back on this one as in here, it is a question of life or death) and respect of the other, which element will change a habit which spread germs? Will an awareness campaign really make a difference? To tell someone that his practices have consequences, put words, pictures under his nose, will it makes him conscious of washing his hands, avoiding touching raw (and even cooked) food with bare hands (even washed), using a spoon to taste a dish and then putting it back into the dish? But this is a bit restrictive as for example, someone will be careful not to contaminate the whole family and will understand by himself not to lick a knife which will be used in a common dish. This person will understand that this is dangerous and that it is reducing conservation of the dish, germs spreading quickly.
Again, I’m sure that respect of the other is a key factor of ‘development’ (this word is stale now). Maybe this person was feeling concerned about his family. I will probably called idealist but I believe in feeling concerned by all things and people.
What have been the key factor for change for myself? I would say education and shock (especially while being journalist). But maybe this is not only one answer and maybe the way is very long…
Internship, of new professional life
We are recruiting interns at the Centre de Presse Malagasy. Some were shy but one of them was really scared! It made me think of when I was looking for an internship in journalism in Paris. God, it was Hell! I was going to offices and I was always told people were unavailable because of reunions, but I saw few passing behind the reception desk. Who would take the risk of recruiting a young ‘Maghreb/Pakistani/Unknown origin-like’ girl from an almost unknown journalism school, who had no network? I also remember how I was shacking during my first times for my internship at RFO (now Réunion Première, Reunionnese State Radio/TV). I have to say that some ‘journalists’ were not really tender with me… I will always remember what a freelancer working for RFO told me on my first day: ’Don’t even think that your work will be broadcasted!’ Bad luck for him, all I did was broadcasted, even in national, during my internship. Even during my other internships I must say… This is a call to all interns: be confident, don’t be impressed by embittered staff and more than anything, if someone is taking time to explain you things, giving you tricks, take it!
Great principles
I will never forget when one day, someone told me: ‘But, you really are doing what you!’ At this time, I did not get the significance of this sentence. Fitting your principles is not common and even worse for its application.
I won’t forget as well a discussion with a friend in Australia. He regretted that the fact of having kids and daily life destroyed his 70’s principles about revolution, solidarity, ecology. You are conscious but ‘trapped’ into life.
Again, I’m asking to myself where does determination of some comes from. In a society in which nothing is serious anymore, everything can be done later, in which overgrown teenagers (and kidults) are armies and in which technology is supposed to save mankind anyway, what is happening in the minds of these people defending and living their values? Why don’t they use excuses, missing time, tiredness, laziness, fatalism, like others? Why don’t they share general indolence?
Why drunkenness of sleight of hand is not reaching me? I deeply hate apathy. And if it spreading to a whole country, it is looking like Hell to me.
Back to school
I’m seriously back to revisions for my DAEFLE exam. I’m visiting lots of forums and maybe will get a chance to watch classrooms at the Alliance Française of Antananarivo. I’ve picked the Teaching Adults option; I really like adult learning. We are not learning the same way at different ages. And not getting it the same way and during the same period.
I keep taking Malagasy lessons with a teacher with my flatmates. I like her way of teaching, quite close to what I learn with French as a Second Language.
Native music
I saw Marcel Camus’s ‘Orfeu Negro’, a DVD borrowed at the Institut Français de Madagascar. I wanted to watch it for a while.
Even if I was born in Reunion Island, 100% from the Indian Ocean with a Reunionnese mother and Mauritian father, I was raised in bossa nova music. My father always loved, played and made me listen this music from my childhood. My uncle was a fantastic bossa nova guitarist. He was not a carioca either but just loved this music. His dream was to go to Brazil, meet and play guitar with people over there. Halas, he couldn’t achieve his dream. He died from cancer.
But this love of guitar, lascivious and melancholic, was passed onto me. As French was my native tongue, bossa nova was my native music. Unfortunately, I was not immersed into creol language and maloya (traditional Reunionnese music) and the explanation deserves an entire post, a theme that I will develop later.
I really loved ‘Orfeu Negro’, its fragile beauty. I was moved to be brought back to a universe that I know and doesn’t know at all.
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